Ultimately it is unimportant whether the text’s dispersion is rich here and poor there; there are nodes, blanks, many figures break off short; some, being hypostases of the whole of the lover’s discourse, have just the rarity—the poverty—of essences: What is to be said of Languor, of the Image, of the Love Letter, since it is the whole of the lover’s discourse which is woven of languorous desire, of the image-repertoire, of declarations? But he who utters this discourse and shapes its episodes does not know that a book is to be made of them; he does not yet know that as a good cultural subject he should neither repeat nor contradict himself, nor take the whole for the part; all he knows is that what passes through his mind at a certain moment is marked, like the printout of a code (in other times, this would have been the code of courtly love, or the Carte du Tendre).
Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
